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Plan to Issue New Permits for Parking Is Debated

Nine blocks from the steel shadow of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, Gib Veconi circles Prospect Heights nightly in his 13-year-old Volvo wagon looking for a parking spot, like a buzzard scouring for a meal.

Parking can be a blood sport in New York City, nowhere more so than along the crowded streets around the half-built Barclays Center in Brooklyn, centerpiece of the Atlantic Yards project. When it opens next fall for concerts and Nets basketball, the competition will get fiercer.

Fearing for pedestrian safety and pollution, while hoping to preserve the scarce parking spots left, local leaders like Mr. Veconi, the treasurer of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, have long advocated residential parking permits, or R.P.P. The cost of a permit has yet to be determined.

“It is a problem that is already a significant one, and by putting an arena on top of it, it would absolutely cause the streets to burst open with cars,” Mr. Veconi, 48, said. “If R.P.P. is not implemented by the time the arena opens, there’s going to be an outcry from those neighborhood associations like something you’ve never heard before.”

On Wednesday, the outcry was concentrated at a public hearing of the City Council Committee on State and Federal Legislation. With hundreds of city residents, mostly from Brooklyn, attending, the committee voted 6 to 1 to send the issue, which would affect all boroughs, to the full Council on Thursday for a decision on whether to send the matter to Albany for consideration.

If the state enacts legislation proposed by State Senator Daniel L. Squadron and Assemblywoman Joan L. Millman to authorize the city to create residential permits, the City Council, together with the Transportation Department and community boards, would decide how to introduce the permits, neighborhood by neighborhood.

While the two most pressing areas mentioned Wednesday were those around the Barclay Center and Yankee Stadium, neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights and Flushing, Queens, have also been clamoring for relief.

“The communities in and around Downtown Brooklyn get a lot of people who drive in and take mass transit the rest of the way,” said Michael Cairl, the president of the Park Slope Civic Council. His group hopes a permit plan would discourage the practice.

The plan has its detractors, though, and the city’s Transportation Department expressed concern. David Woloch, a deputy commissioner, said the permits would require enforcement by an already stretched Police Department. Cities that have such programs, like Toronto and Boston, are less congested than New York, he said.

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The department has undertaken a feasibility study around the Barclays Center and Yankee Stadium, and Mr. Woloch said that even if the program was adopted, “there would be no guarantee that residents would find a parking space in their neighborhood.”

Councilman Lewis A. Fidler of Brooklyn cast the only dissenting vote, describing the permits as a slippery slope toward forcing drivers in every neighborhood in the city to pay for parking.

“Government loves new revenue streams,“ Mr. Fidler said.

Still, the cost of a residential permit in other cities is hardly exorbitant: $35 a year in Washington, free in Boston.

The final environmental impact study by the Empire State Development Corporation for the Atlantic Yards project estimated an influx of about 2,500 cars on event nights and indicated that up to 3,000 on-street parking spaces would be necessary.

Several traffic consultants considered those estimates too conservative. Brian Ketcham, a retired traffic engineer who created models that showed that the Atlantic Yards arena would worsen the gridlock, worried that a residential permit plan could make traffic worse by taking away spots for people going to the arena and by inspiring local residents to buy cars.

“There will be less parking for merchants,” he said.

Residents around Yankee Stadium have already felt the loss of street parking and seen the increased cruising from fans hoping to avoid paying for parking garages, Councilwoman Helen D. Foster of the Bronx, chairwoman of the committee, said.

She ended the hearing with a warning to Brooklyn residents. “What happened in the Bronx,” she said, “is coming to you now.”

Correction: March 21, 2012

A previous version of this article misidentified the location of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which will open later this year. It is on rail yards and other land in Prospect Heights and on a block in Park Slope; it is not in Downtown Brooklyn, although it is near that neighborhood. (The error also appeared in a number of articles in 2011, including ones on June 30, Aug. 27, Nov. 3 and Nov. 16.)

Tim Stelloh contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 3, 2011, on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Plan to Issue New Permits For Parking Is Debated. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe